Peds Reviews

Briley & Ellis found that 52% of children who stutter (CWS; ages 3–17) also had at least one additional developmental disability, compared to just 15% of children who do not stutter (CWNS), per parent report gathered in a large-scale survey. Specifically, CWS had significantly higher odds of having intellectual disability, learning disability, ADHD/ADD, ASD, or another delay than CWNS.

Deevy and Leonard found that preschoolers with DLD were less sensitive to number information (i.e. is vs. are) in sentences with fronted auxiliary verbs than younger, typically developing children. “Is the nice little boy running?” is an example of this form (note the auxiliary “is” at the front of the sentence). The authors suggest children with DLD might need explicit instruction to understand tense and agreement markers—in other words, it might not be enough to just practice producing them correctly.

Duncan & Lederberg examined the ways that teachers of K–2nd grade deaf/hard of hearing children communicated in the classroom and related it to the students’ language outcomes. They found that explicitly teaching vocabulary predicted improvements in both vocabulary and morphosyntax over the school year, and that reformulating/recasting children’s statements also predicted vocabulary growth.

Kelly et al. interviewed teenagers with high-functioning autism, who reported their perceptions of their own social communication skills. They shared individual experiences with challenges with verbal and nonverbal communication, managing challenging feelings during communication with peers, and feelings of isolation and rejection.

Mandak et al.* added to the evidence on Transition to Literacy (T2L) features in AAC software with visual scene displays (VSDs). They found that when digital books were programmed with these features—hotspots that, when touched, would speak the target word and display it dynamically—and used in therapy for preschool-aged children with autism, the children made gains in the ability to read targeted sight words.

Goodrich et al. administered three subtests of the Test of Preschool Early Literacy (TOPEL) to 1,221 preschool children, including 751 who were Spanish-speaking language-minority children. Despite the TOPEL being written in English, they found that it provided reliable and valid measures of Spanish-speaking preschoolers’ early literacy skills in English.

*Disclosure: Kelsey Mandak is a writer for The Informed SLP. She was not involved in the selection or review of this article.